How to Give: An Ancient Guide to Giving and Receiving

By Seneca

Timeless wisdom on generosity and gratitude from the great Stoic philosopher Seneca

To give and receive well may be the most human thing you can do—but it is also the closest you can come to divinity. So argues the great Roman Stoic thinker Seneca (c. 4 BCE–65 CE) in his longest and most searching moral treatise, “On Benefits” (De Beneficiis). James Romm’s splendid new translation of essential selections from this work conveys the heart of Seneca’s argument that generosity and gratitude are among the most important of all virtues.

For Seneca, the impulse to give to others lies at the very foundation of society; without it, we are helpless creatures, worse than wild beasts. But generosity did not arise randomly or by chance. Seneca sees it as part of our desire to emulate the gods, whose creation of the earth and heavens stands as the greatest gift of all. Seneca’s soaring prose captures his wonder at that gift, and expresses a profound sense of gratitude that will inspire today’s readers.

Complete with an enlightening introduction and the original Latin on facing pages, How to Give is a timeless guide to the profound significance of true generosity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Oct 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9780691211367

Seneca

The writer and politician Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BCE–65 CE) was one of the most influential figures in the philosophical school of thought known as Stoicism. He was notoriously condemned to death by enforced suicide by the Emperor Nero.

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HOW TO GIVE

ANCIENT WISDOM FOR MODERN READERS

How to Give: An Ancient Guide to Giving and Receiving by Seneca

How to Drink: A Classical Guide to the Art of Imbibing by Vincent Obsopoeus

How to Be a Bad Emperor: An Ancient Guide to Truly Terrible Leaders by Suetonius

How to Be a Leader: An Ancient Guide to Wise Leadership by Plutarch

How to Think about God: An Ancient Guide for Believers and Nonbelievers by Marcus Tullius Cicero

How to Keep Your Cool: An Ancient Guide to Anger Management by Seneca

How to Think about War: An Ancient Guide to Foreign Policy by Thucydides

How to Be Free: An Ancient Guide to the Stoic Life by Epictetus

How to Be a Friend: An Ancient Guide to True Friendship by Marcus Tullius Cicero

How to Die: An Ancient Guide to the End of Life by Seneca

How to Win an Argument: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Persuasion by Marcus Tullius Cicero

How to Grow Old: Ancient Wisdom for the Second Half of Life by Marcus Tullius Cicero

How to Run a Country: An Ancient Guide for Modern Leaders by Marcus Tullius Cicero

HOW TO GIVE

An Ancient Guide to Giving and Receiving

Seneca

Selected, translated, and introduced

by James S. Romm

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2020 by Princeton University Press

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to [e-mail]

The Latin texts for De Beneficiis are reprinted from The Latin Library, http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/about.html. The Latin text for Epistle 81 is reprinted from Epistles 66–92, translated by Richard M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library #76, Harvard University Press, 1920.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, approximately 4 B.C.-65 A.D., author. | Romm, James S., translator.

Title: How to give : an ancient guide to giving and receiving / Seneca ; selected, translated, and introduced by James S. Romm.

Other titles: De beneficiis. Selections English | An ancient guide to giving and receiving

Description: Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020007754 (print) | LCCN 2020007755 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691192093 (acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780691211367 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Conduct of life—Early works to 1800. | Benevolence—Early works to 1800.

Classification: LCC BJ1550 .S4613 2020 (print) | LCC BJ1550 (ebook) | DDC 177/.7—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007754

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007755

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Rob Tempio and Matt Rohal

Production Editorial: Sara Lerner

Text and Jacket Design: Pamela L. Schnitter

Jacket Credit: Empress Livia Drusilla, wife of Augustus, as Ceres, 38 BC. Marble sculpture, Roman. Photo: Hervé Lewandowski / Musée du Louvre. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

CONTENTS

Introduction     vii

On Benefits     1

Epistle 81     235

Notes     253

INTRODUCTION

When was the last time you gave someone a gift? Perhaps it was on an occasion when gifts are expected—a birthday, or wedding, or graduation. Or perhaps you gave spontaneously, out of the goodness of your heart, as the expression goes. Perhaps you treated a date to a meal, or brought a bottle of wine to a dinner party, or wrote a check to a charity or cause. Probably you did not stop to consider the moral meaning of your action, or fully appreciate the fact that, in the eyes of the Roman writer Seneca, you were, in some small way, saving the world. Your ability to give, as Seneca discussed in his treatise De Beneficiis, or On Benefits, is an essential part of what makes you human, and if your giving is done in the right spirit, it can even bring you close to the divine.

As a thinker of the Stoic school, Seneca saw a divine plan behind all human activity, especially the giving of gifts and doing of favors. His philosophy had strong underpinnings in religious belief. He speaks of a Guiding Principle, from which things take their form (1.6, on p. 23), though he sometimes imagines this as composed of a plurality of beings, or equates it with Nature or with the stars and planets. In the end, he claims at one point (4.7, pp. 135–37), it’s not important what name we give to the first cause of all things, whether we make it singular or plural, or whether we personify it, so long as we strive to follow the inner promptings it has instilled in us. The impulse toward generosity, he maintains—the goodness of our hearts—is foremost among these.

How does the human race survive, Seneca asks, lacking the speed, strength, and ferocity of other animals? Only through our two unique attributes (4.18): Reason and what Seneca calls societas, the social impulse, here rendered Fellowship for want of a better translation. Our ability to help one another, to pool our resources, to give, has elevated us above the wild creatures that otherwise outstrip us, and indeed has made us masters of creation. (Seneca was not well versed enough in the natural world to spot a similar social impulse in other animals, and he knew little of the apes and monkeys that share this trait with human beings.)

In Seneca’s eyes, we did not develop these abilities over time, as a modern evolutionary biologist might claim. Our impulse toward generosity was hard-wired from the start. We are meant to be generous beings, just as we are meant to be virtuous in other ways, to employ reason to guide our actions, and to prevent virulent emotions—anger in particular, as well as fear, especially fear of death—from throwing our minds off course. These are core principles of the Stoic school, explored by Seneca in the many prose treatises and open letters he published throughout his life. (My two other volumes in the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series, How to Keep Your Cool and How to Die, present Seneca’s thinking on the problem of disruptive emotions—anger in the first case, fear of death in the second.)

In the treatise excerpted here, De Beneficiis, or On Benefits, Seneca sought to strengthen the giving impulse and heighten our awareness of how much we gain by following it, and how much we lose by ignoring or perverting it. Selfishness, timidity, egoism, greed, and a dozen other failings, in Seneca’s view, get in the way of our divine natures. We decline to give, or we give badly, lording our gift over those who receive it, seeking renown for having given, or expecting something in exchange, a return for our gift—in that case a gift no longer, but something more like a loan, bribe, or business transaction. On the other side of the gifting relationship, we often also get badly, without the sense of gratefulness that makes us want to be givers ourselves. Our ingratitude makes others less willing to give, and the binding ties of societas begin to fray.

On Benefits is the longest of Seneca’s extant essays, an indication of the importance he gave to its theme. He may well have added to it over time, for the last three of its seven books have a very different tenor than the first four, and the seventh book contains some off-topic material that feels like a later accretion. Even after completing it, he still had more to say on the subject, for he devoted one of his Moral Epistles to the same subject, characterizing that letter as an extension and expansion of On Benefits. A portion of that letter is included in this volume; its publication date is known to be 64 AD, just before Seneca’s death. On Benefits might have been composed at any point during the eight years before that, or perhaps over much of that time span.

During all of those eight years, and indeed beginning slightly before (in 54 AD), Seneca lived a double life, composing philosophic essays and tragic dramas, but also serving as chief minister to Nero, ruler of Rome, whom he had tutored as a youth. Nero succeeded to the role of princeps, what we now generally term emperor, at seventeen, an age at which he badly needed the advice and moral authority of an older man. Seneca, a respected statesman, writer, and thinker three times Nero’s age, provided the new regime with that authority. Seneca worked closely with Nero for a decade, growing extremely wealthy in the meanwhile, but as the partnership deteriorated (along with Nero’s sanity), he found himself trapped. Though he offered to surrender his huge estate, Nero (according to an account of his thinking set down by the historian Tacitus) would not accept the bargain or permit him to depart the palace. Allowing Seneca to return what he had received, Nero reasoned (again in Tacitus’s account), would make the regime look predatory. After further estrangement, in 65 AD, the emperor seized on ambiguous evidence to accuse Seneca of treason and force him to commit suicide.

Because Seneca had gotten fabulously rich, quite possibly with the help of Nero’s handouts, and then found it impossible to give back what he’d accepted, the topic of gifts and giving held special meaning in his life. One would not guess this from On Benefits, however. With a discretion born of the perils of tyranny, Seneca kept his own life, and political career, offstage in this treatise, as in almost all his other writings. Even when he refers to attendants of royal power (2.5) who keep petitioners waiting before dispensing favors, he gives no hint that he himself was on most mornings surrounded by such petitioners, clients (clientes) in Roman parlance, who needed imperial help and sought Seneca’s